A great deal of effort has been invested in recent years in order to determine the behavior and preferences of Internet computer users. These behaviors and preferences have been analyzed in order to make marketing decisions, customize content, customize and sort search results, and for other related purposes associated with Internet computer users. These efforts have focused on gathering information directly from a user or from a related individual concerning the user's behavior and preferences and have included tracking the behavior of the user by the use of cookies.
The information gathered is often inaccurate or incomplete due to limitations in the information gathering approach of conventional information gathering systems. For example, most conventional information gathering systems maintain counts of positive activities, such as a count of the number of times a link is clicked or a number of times a page is visited. This counting is usually performed in response to an action by a user, such as clicking a link, and is usually performed at a server, such as a search engine. Some search engines count visited links as positive events and use such counts to increase the likelihood that the visited links will be returned to a user when a subsequent search query is sent from the user to the search engine. Unfortunately, when a user follows a link and does not like the content or does not find the link useful, conventional search engines still return the link and do so with a higher preference during subsequent searches.
Information which is missing from conventional tracking efforts and which is not tracked includes data about what a user does not do while browsing the Internet and which links a user does not follow or does not like when followed. Negative counts for links are not maintained, and information associated with negative activity is not tracked within conventional information gathering systems. The general lack of information about what Internet computer users do not do and what information they do not find useful creates lost opportunities for marketing, customizing content, customizing search results and for other related purposes associated with Internet computer users.
Additionally, because conventional systems track information on the server side of a transaction and because servers may only respond to positive actions that are sent to the server for processing, server-side tracking limits the amount and type of information that may be tracked. Accordingly, server-side tracking results in less information being available for use in relation to making. marketing decisions, customizing content, customizing and sorting search results, and for other related purposes associated with Internet computer users. Server tracking is also site specific and does not consider differences in preferences between users.
Accordingly, in light of these difficulties associated with conventional behavior and preference gathering mechanisms, there exists a need for improved methods, systems, and computer program products for characterizing links to resources not activated within a page in a browser.